More high school grads than ever are going to college, but 1 in 5 will quit

New data show little progress in retaining students, despite efforts to plug the leak

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The line between Texas and Arkansas in front of the bi-state federal building, which straddles both. Texas A&M University at Texarkana has one of the lowest retention rates of public higher-education institutions; 55 percent who started in 2012 were gone by 2016. Photo: AP photo/Jeannie Nuss

TEXARKANA, Texas — New buildings are shooting up around the sun-baked grounds of the Texas A&M University System’s northernmost outpost here.

There’s a $32 million glass-fronted complex near completion that will house the nursing program and administrative offices, and a new $11 million recreation center that will also have a lab to study kinesiology, or human movement.

TAMU-Texarkana may be the smallest of the system’s 11 campuses, but it’s been growing steadily. Enrollment at the beginning of the academic year just ended was up 13 percent from 2014, to 2,038.

While the number of students has been rising, however, so has the proportion who begin as full-time freshmen but fail to come back for a second year. Fifty-five percent who started in 2015 were gone by the following year, the most recent period for which the figures are available, according to U.S. Department of Education data analyzed by The Hechinger Report. That’s up from 44 percent two years before.

“There are some people who have situations, who get pregnant or financial things change,” said Caleb Sparks, a double major in biology and electrical engineering hanging out between classes in the air-conditioned student center.

“I know of people who have left because they didn’t want to be in college,” added Amber Spence, who earned her undergraduate degree here and is now a graduate student. “Their parents made them go.” And even on a small campus where students greet each other by name, she said, “There are still individuals who feel lonely and isolated.”

These and other challenges mean that, at a time when growing proportions of high school students have been successfully encouraged to go on to college, more than one in five full-time freshmen nationwide fail to return for a second year, according to the data.

That, in turn, contributes to the fact that more than a third of students who start college still haven’t earned degrees after six years, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports, often piling up loan debt with no payoff. Those who disappear for good cost colleges and universities — including taxpayer-supported public ones like TAMU-Texarkana — billions of dollars in lost tuition revenue.

Students who are the first in their families to go to college are the most affected. Three years after enrolling, one-third had quit, compared to about a quarter of students whose parents have a university degree, the Education Department reports.

Yet even as attention has begun to be focused on this problem and its massive cost, the numbers are barely improving, The Hechinger Report found. At some types of institutions, they’re flat or getting worse, according to the data.

“It’s not just about getting them in the door. It’s about making sure they come back from one year to the next,” said Eboni Zamani-Gallaher, a professor of higher education policy, organization and leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Education. “That’s the conundrum we still haven’t gotten figured out yet.”

In a trend that has been widely lauded, the proportion of high school graduates who go straight to college has increased from 63 percent in 2000 to 70 percent now, the Department of Education says.

The proportion of high school graduates going on to college has been rising, but the proportion who stay once they get there is flat or down, new federal data show. Photo by Ben Smith for The Hechinger Report

But the proportion of full-time, first-time students who return for a second year, either full- or part-time — a measure called retention — has improved only slightly at public four-year universities, where it is up by 2.6 percentage points since 2011, the federal data show. At private nonprofit colleges, it’s eked up by just 1.3 percentage points. And at private for-profit colleges and universities, more than 44 percent of students leave before finishing, a figure that is eight-tenths of a percentage points worse than it was in 2011.

Rates at which full-time freshmen return to college for a second year, either full- or part-time.

2011

2016

All schools

78.5%

80.8%

Public

78.6%

81.1%

Private not-for-profit

80.2%

81.6%

Private for-profit

56.5%

55.7%

Source: Hechinger Report analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Four-year institutions only, from the most recent period available.

according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, including the number of degrees awarded and student progress toward degrees.

Another: Employers are impatient for qualified graduates to hire. “People are talking about shortages in the workforce,” said Zoë Corwin, a researcher at the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. “I’m optimistic that there’s been a national shift in awareness in how we think of this, so that’s promising.”

But the biggest reason for the new focus on preventing students from leaving is that colleges are starting to run out of them.

While a larger percentage of high school graduates are going on to higher educations, their actual numbers have declined dramatically, and the number of older-than-traditional-age adults on campus is also down as more are drawn back into the thriving labor market.

And that makes institutions “a little more sensitive to retention,” Zamani-Gallaher said.

After all, the plummeting number of prospects makes it much harder to replace dropouts than it was when there was a seemingly bottomless supply of freshmen.

“There’s a growing notion that we need to change the business model, and the reason it needs to change is there’s not a never-ending flow of high school graduates,” said Bruce Vandal, senior vice president at Complete College America.

Students who leave are also costing colleges significant amounts of money in forgone tuition — $16.5 billion a year collectively, according to a review of 1,669 institutions by the Educational Policy Institute, or $13.3 million for the average public and nearly $10 million for the typical private college or university. Those are big hits for campuses already struggling to close budget shortfalls.

Yet colleges remain focused on recruitment, “which they already know how to do,” said Andrew Nichols, senior director of higher education research at The Education Trust. “It’s harder work to retain students.”

They may no longer be able to avoid it.

“I know of people who have left because they didn’t want to be in college. Their parents made them go.”

Amber Spence, graduate student, Texas A&M University at Texarkana

While state higher education funding in Texas doesn’t consider institutions’ retention rates, the TAMU System makes them glaringly public in an online dashboard.

“The world of higher education has really changed about this,” said Emily Fourmy Cutrer, president of TAMU-Texarkana, where student persistence is the lowest of the system’s 10 campuses. “We are under more pressure for retention and graduation.”

Reminders have popped up all around the campus about a website called Degree Works, which tells students which requirements they’ve satisfied and what’s still left to do. “Not sure you’re on the right track for graduation?” it calls out to passersby from among notices on bulletin boards advertising class rings and intramural ultimate Frisbee.

“They have all these safety nets — tutoring, advising,” said Camryn Davis, a TAMU-Texarkana sophomore majoring in biotechnology. “We actually do get flags when the advisor forces you to come and see them.” Those kinds of reminders happen “pretty much all semester,” said Hailee Witten, a senior education major. “There’s posters, there’s emails. They hag you.” Witten stopped to reflect on whether she just made up that word, but then described it as a combination of “hassle” and “nag.”

This aggressive response has helped lower the dropout rate at the Texarkana campus back to 44 percent, according to still-unreleased figures, the university says. Between the fall and spring, it said, only 11 percent of students left, a record low.

“We have interventional advising, and that’s not a bad thing,” said Cutrer, who wears an eagle pin in honor of the university’s athletics mascot. She said supporting students has become a top priority. “Woe to the faculty member who says, ‘My class is a weed-out class.’ That is not a thing any more.”

But making further headway is stymied by the nature of the problem. Colleges don’t always know someone is in danger of leaving until he or she stops showing up. It’s also difficult, under a federal ban on tracking individual students, to know if they enrolled or finished somewhere else.

Dropouts cost colleges a collective $16.5 billion a year in forgone tuition revenue, one study found.

“It would be great to do an exit interview,” Zamani-Gallaher said. “But we don’t have the benefit of knowing in advance that a student is leaving. We have this lag time in realizing they’re not here.”

Or, as one undergraduate who quit put it, “Leaving was weird. Nobody noticed.”

That comment came in response to a rare endeavor by a higher-education institution: a survey emailed to 10,555 of them in 2014 by the University of Washington to learn why some students left before graduating.

Many of those who answered — fewer than one in five, in spite of a chance at a $200 gift card — said they ran into financial problems or worried about falling too deeply into debt. Forty-one percent said they felt isolated or alone and 39 percent that they didn’t think they were getting their money’s worth. Racial and ethnic minority students were particularly likely to report that their scholarship money ran out or was not renewed, that their families needed them or that the university wouldn’t let them continue because they fell behind in their payments.

Many students balance college and jobs. Cutrer, who teaches a freshman seminar, said six students in her class of 20 told her they worked 40 hours a week, eight worked 30 or more hours and the rest worked at least part time.

“If it’s between earning money and going to class, I’m going to earn money because I have to support people,” said Seidman, author of the new book Crossing the Finish Line: How to Retain and Graduate Your Students. Students “don’t understand the cost-benefit of going to college” — the typically higher wages earned by degree-holders — “and we do a bad job of explaining that.”

“It’s not just about getting them in the door. It’s about making sure they come back from one year to the next.”

Eboni Zamani-Gallaher, a professor of higher education policy, organization and leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Education

Black and Hispanic students also disproportionately enroll at community colleges and regional public universities that can’t afford to provide the level of support that better-funded private colleges and public flagships can, a new report by the Center for American Progress shows.

“Access without success is not really solving the problems we need to solve, especially for the most disadvantaged,” said Vandal.

The new federal data about retention generally confirm a close connection with graduation rates, especially for nonwhite students.

In Ohio, for example, three of the seven regional Ohio University campuses — Chillicothe, Eastern and Lancaster — have dropout rates of 46 percent, 48 percent, and 44 percent, respectively. Only 36 percent, 32 percent and 31 percent of their white students graduate within six years, and 50 percent, 25 percent and 5 percent of their black students. (All three campuses enroll comparatively low numbers of Hispanics and Chillicothe and Eastern small numbers of blacks.)

Eastern’s numbers are improving, though Chillicothe’s have gotten worse and Lancaster’s are essentially flat, said Bill Willan, the system’s executive dean for regional higher education. Those figures don’t capture the many students juggling families and jobs who take more than six years to finish, he said, or who enter school planning on bachelor’s degrees but change their minds and get lower-level associate degrees or certificates that also are available to them at Lancaster and Chillicothe.

“If they achieve that credential, that’s a success,” said Willan.

Still, the system has started working with beginning students to declare their majors more quickly, since commitment to a major has been shown to improve retention, Willan said. It’s also bought new software that alerts advisors to students who miss classes or assignments and is expanding career services and helping students figure out what courses they’ll need to get their desired jobs.

“We do have a number of folks who will start with us who for whatever reason are not focused,” Willan said.

Among other reasons, he said, is that rural Ohio, where the regional campuses are located, has very low proportions of people with degrees.

At public Kent State University at Trumbull, 46 percent of students leave, down 17 percentage points since 2006; only 62 percent of white and 1 percent of black students finished with degrees in six years.

That school faces issues including high levels of opioid addiction in the area it serves, said spokesman Bill Burgess; it’s hired a mental-health counselor, added a program this spring to keep students focused on their academics, has teamed up with the nonprofit Gardner Institute to improve retention and is creating an app that will connect struggling students with classmates who can offer them advice and encouragement.

At private, historically black Lincoln University in Missouri, 53 percent of students drop out, the data show. That’s up 4 percentage points since 2006. Only 41 percent of white and 18 percent of black students finished with degrees in six years. The university did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

In general, said Willan, “Attitudes are changing. It used to be there was sort of a feeling that it was up to the student. Now when we look at a student and we see that there’s a challenge for them to overcome, we’re more prone to want to help them overcome the challenge.”

Additional reporting by Dana Amihere.

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This article focuses on the challenges of improving success and enrollment—problems that are not just occurring now, but will likely be a trend. In his book Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, Grawe (2018) predicts reductions in enrollment through 2025. Other recent publications have noted similar trends accompanied by dire warnings (e.g., Chronicle of Higher Education (2018) The Future of College Enrollment, “U.S. colleges are expected to see a steady decline in their enrollments and this could threaten their continued existence”).

It important to study colleges that have turned this situation around and have increased both student success and retention and, in turn, revenue. As reported by Tinto in Leaving College (1993), students leave because they do not feel connected to the institution; but that can be successfully addressed. In our work with colleges we have found that faculty and staff can have considerable positive impact on student retention with just a few simple behaviors, intentionally conducted. These behaviors assist faculty and staff to connect with students as people in their classes and student services. The results are astounding.

One college’s in-class retention rates for all student demographic groups has reached 96% and there are no equity gaps. Course success rates have soared to 81%, up more than 11 percentage points, term-to-term persistence has increased by 15% and is now over 80% for all student subpopulations, and three-year graduation rates increased by 110% in three years.

At a second college for first-time-in-college students, term-to-term persistence rates increased 24 percentage points to 83%; and year-to-year persistence (Fall 2016 to Fall 2017) increased 26 percentage points to 68%.

At a third, considerable gains have been made in closing the achievement gap. Historically, their three-year course success rate average ranged from 71% to 92% across ethnic subpopulations. After only one year of implementation course success rates increased for all groups and the range diminished to only four points: from 90 to 94 percent.

Clearly, to successfully keep students in the system and moving toward success we need to get beyond the academics and treat them as we want to be treated, not merely as FTE.

Dr. Brad C. Phillips, President

Institute for Evidence-Based Change

- from Brad C Phillips, Jul 06, 2018

The challenge is in developing qualified students who should be admitted to higher education: far more than one in five of those who are not qualified students will quit, and institutions enrolling them should be forced to vary their federal student loan interest rates so that the risk to the taxpayer of students defaulting on repaying those debts is factored into their financial aid. Access and affordability remain weak spots in America's otherwise top quality higher education system, and they stem from social weaknesses in its secondary schools, which are extraordinarily out of date in their basic design, being still derived from the Committee of Ten of 1892. European nations like Switzerland are doing much better here: more than 90 percent of Swiss who enrol in higher education graduate, and the majority of Swiss youth who choose otherwise and enrol in vocational training are generally employed in satisfying jobs since their vocational qualifications earn them starting wages of around $20 per hour.

- from Bruce William Smith, Jul 06, 2018

Some of the reasons for students not finishing their degrees are right there in your article.

As a community college teacher in three communities for 25 years, I can say that many students who drop out didn't want to be in college anyway. In more affluent communities, it's “my parents said I had to go”; in others, it's “they told me that if I didn't get a college degree, I'd work at McDonald's all my life.” These students are as likely to flunk out as drop out. The fortunate ones—and I know several—realize after one or two semesters that college is not for them, at least not right now, and get training as LPNs, HVAC mechanics, or welders. Those people earn a living, are happy, and some (like the LPN) may eventually return to college. In fact, this is an excellent use of community college—I tried it, I hated it, I found something better for my life.

You point out that transfer students aren't tracked—so they count as drop outs and “failures.” In fact, now students who take “too long” to finish a degree are also considered failures, so the student I knew who transferred to a four-year school 17 credits short of a degree with a 3.78 average (and earned a BA) is a failure; the grandmother who was involved in her church, edited the literary magazine, was a peer tutor and who took 8 years to complete her associate's degree (six credits each semester, maintaining a 4.0 average) is a failure. Oh, yes, and so am I; I earned an honors bachelor's degree from Harvard University Extension. It took me 12 years.

In other words, the statistics are flawed. But no one says so.

Some students are able to work 20 or more hours a week and go full time, but many aren't. The responsible (and often older) student refuse to take on more than they can handle and go part-time. But colleges are under tremendous pressure to get students to graduate “on time,” so many students take too many courses (“the counselor told me I had to go full time”), fail them, take too many again, fail again, and drop out.

Many students do come unprepared, but of course, the current thinking is that they are just “unlucky,” and can be rushed through courses much too hard for them. (The college from which I just retired told an illiterate student who failed remedial reading to “just ask for a waiver—don't waste your time retaking the course.” He's the one now doing welding, union job, very happy.) As a result, some use up all their financial aid money failing and failing until they drop out. Or until some unreasonable teacher in second semester comp fails them for plagiarism when half the paper is cut and pasted from a web site.

I question the assertion that “comunity colleges . . . can't afford to provide the level of support that better-funded private colleges and public flagships can.” The community colleges where I worked had extra-ordinary support services, and, more important, small classes. Transfer students would come back to tell us how much better the community college was than the big schools with lecture classes of several hundred students. We provided a different level of support—basic tutoring in nearly every subject, help with finding resources to deal with abuse, divorce, addiction (student or family), layoffs, psychological problems, etc. We weren't writing letters of recommendation to graduate schools (as I did as a teaching fellow at a private university), but I worked with extraordinary people who spent hours of extra time helping students with studies and life issues, sometime providing supplies, money, transportation, and temporary housing.

And speaking of support services: You know the saying about the horse and drinking? No matter how good the support service, if the students don't use it, it doesn't make a difference. Some students simply don't have the time (work, family, etc.) or the transportation (those who make elaborate car pool arrangements). Many have been burned by being previously stuck in a “resource room” and no amount of evidence will persuade them that the tutoring services are different. Some aren't realistic about how much studying they need to do, as they have always had a last-minute reprieve in high school or when they plagiarize. Someone found a way for them to graduate, and surely these college teachers don't really mean they will fail. Some assume that tutoring services mean the tutor will do the work for them, not help them learn how to learn.

To summarize: College focus on forcing students through a curriculum as quickly as possible in order to achieve external goals set by people who don't teach. No provision is made for circumstances that might make it necessary—or even preferable—for someone to take longer, or transfer.

Students arrive at college under- or unprepared and college don't want to “waste time” preparing them (nor should they have to).

Students are coping with external stresses—making a living, supporting families, dealing with addiction and mental problems—that interfere with their ability to complete their classes.

Students don't understand what it means to study. “Two to three hours outside of class for evey hour you spend in class? Oh, no, they don't really mean that.”

I retired three years earlier than I intended because I was burned out. It wasn't the students—I still work with some of them and, indeed, with some of their children—it was the administration, the “advisors” who knew nothing about the classes or the students, and the obsession with shoving students through, whether they had the skills, the knowledge, or the desire, just to fill in the “achievement” boxes.

- from Jane Arnold, Jul 10, 2018

why are these kids getting out of High School....if they aren't capable?

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